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Luke Gibbons, F. P. Lock. Edmund Burke: Volume II, 1784–1797. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 605. $160.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 2, April 2008, Pages 576–577, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.2.576
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This imposing second volume brings F. P. Lock's meticulously researched biography of the eminent eighteenth-century statesman and writer to a close. It is devoted primarily to the two great crusades of Edmund Burke's later political career: the sustained campaign against the abuses of empire in India in the 1780s, and Burke's epochal intervention against the French Revolution, launched by the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. These are perhaps Burke's main public achievements, but they are not the only landmarks of his variegated life. Burke, the gentleman farmer who struggled to make ends meet at Beaconsfield, is of as much interest to Lock as the statesman in Whitehall, and not least of the merits of the attention to detail throughout this book is how much it fills in of the rare glimpses of Burke's personal life, hitherto provided only in his letters.
Burke presents an unusual problem for historical biography, however, for unlike most practicing politicians, he was also a political philosopher and an aesthetic theorist of note. His early Philosophical Enquiry in the Origins of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) launched a revolution of its own in eighteenth-century criticism. The biographer thus faces at the outset the difficulty of negotiating the “maladjusted relationship between philosophy and history” that, according to J. G. A. Pocock, has vitiated much of the history of both politics and political thought. The disparate and often elusive facts of Burke's life lend themselves to the kind of intensive empirical research at which Lock excels, but what are we to say of Burke's ideas, not to mention his extraordinary way with words, the sources of much of his contemporary reputation?
